The Historical Imagination and the Victorian Past: A.S. Byatt’s Possession

Abstract

THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION AND THE VICTORIAN PAST: A.S. BYATT’S POSSESSION FREDERICK M. HOLMES Lakehead University O ne of the several meanings implied by the title of A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel is possession of the historical past (Brookner; Heron). The book’s twentieth-century scholars all vie to possess the Victorian story that Roland Michell and Maud Bailey stitch together from a variety of nineteenth-century documents and jealously hoard. Possession grapples with several issues current in critical theory about the ways in which we know the past and the uses to which we put that knowledge. What does it mean to possess the past? Is such an act possible, or is the past irretrievably separate and other? By what means can we know the past? Can we rep­ resent it objectively through empirical methods, or, as the New Historicism teaches, do the particular limitations of our own historical embeddedness necessarily cause us to filter previously-existing representations of the past through the ideological distortions of the present (Montrose 29-30)? Are we always prisoners of our own historical moment, or are there universals in the human condition that permit us to make connections with people of all times and cultures? Is it ever possible to arrive at some point of origin, some base reality outside of our systems of signification, or do we accept the post-structuralist view that we are always kept at a remove from that goal by our confinement within the intertexts of historical representation? Do attempts to make the past live through acts of imaginative empathy result in genuine recuperation, or are they illusions based on what cultural ma­ terialists believe to be the discredited metaphysics of a Romantic idealism? Is it possible to do what Byatt’s Victorian poet Randolph Ash sometimes believes that he does: to lend our voices to the dead and thereby, in a sense, to resurrect them (104)? What is the moral status of our efforts to retrieve the past? Are they born of an escapist urge to indulge in nostalgia, or are they a means of encountering significant realities? I am not sure that Possession clearly answers all of these thorny ques­ tions, but it does offer complex, ambiguous meditations upon them that it will be my task to outline in this essay. Both formally and thematically, the book acknowledges the problematic nature of the relationship between the present and the historical past. Although Byatt has criticized the con­ ception of the Victorian period displayed in John Fowles’s novel The French 319 Lieutenant’s Woman (Passions 174), like his, her depiction of it raises on­ tological doubts about the Victorian past by exposing the extent to which our images of it are fabricated rather than given by nature.1 Both books are examples of that sub-species of postmodernism that Linda Hutcheon has dubbed “historiographic metafiction” : “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Poetics 5). The paradox exists in the way that such works create the illusion of immersing the reader in independently existing histor­ ical events only to undercut that experience by exposing the processes of artifice through which the illusion is created. As Brian McHale observes, whereas even traditional historical novels “typically involve some violation of ontological boundaries,” they “strive to suppress these violations, to hide the ontological ‘seams’ between fictional projections and real-world facts,” while postmodern historical fiction tends to flaunt those “seams” (16-17). The point of such disclosure is to say something not just about fictional illusion but about the difficulties of all attempts to represent experience. His­ tories, Possession reminds us, depend not exclusively or even primarily on what has happened, but on what gets written down, on what motivates those who do the writing, and on the tropes and other rhetorical devices used in it (White 121-34). Histories can be untrustworthy when documents are lost or suppressed; in this novel an important letter from Randolph Ash to Christabel LaMotte about the fate of their child is destroyed (457). Distortion can also result when the surviving materials are corrupted in transcriptions. One of the...